Yahoo! hunts revenue with premium search service

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By Scarlet Pruitt

(IDG) -- Looking for more revenue in a lightweight ad market, Yahoo! Inc. said Wednesday that it is launching premium search content, offering customers access to reference reports, news and authoritative content for a fee.

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The Premium Document Search offers users a research library of more than 70 million pages of full text from more than 7,100 sources that are not readily available on the Web, the company said. The new service includes content from thousands of health, science, medical, academic and trade journals, as well as from newspapers and magazines. Additionally, users can tap into archived news from more than 60 U.S. and international newswires.

Users of the premium content service can choose to pay per document, with prices depending on the item, or $4.95 a month to access up to 50 documents. Summary views of the documents are free.

Yahoo! is making the service available through an agreement with enterprise service provider Divine Inc. Divine, based in Chicago, recently purchased search and content assets from Northern Light Technology LLC.

Yahoo! Premium Document Search launched today and can be accessed at http://premium.search.yahoo.com or through Yahoo! Finance or Yahoo! News.

The premium service comes on the heels of a rough fourth quarter and fiscal year 2001 for the powerhouse portal, which earlier this month reported losses for both periods. Adrift amid the rough waters of an advertising market downturn, Yahoo! has been scrambling to generate alternative revenue sources.